If you are a B2B SaaS company facing challenges in converting your usage data into an invoice on different billing platforms including Stripe, Zuora, Chargebee or Recurly, Metering.ai is meant for you. We understand that maintaining 100s of Excel or Google sheets is not what you want to be doing. We also know that you do not want to be spending your valuable time doing manual work converting this raw data into a format that is accepted by your billing system. If you spend tens of hours every month manually aggregating and transforming your usage data into metered values that your billing system requires, Metering.ai will remove that work completely from your plate.

Let me paint a picture for you - You are a product manager, a finance executive or a customer success manager at an early stage fast growing B2B SaaS company called Flack. You joined Flack hoping to learn and grow from doing a 0 → 1 journey. You are bristling with creative ideas and cannot wait to execute them. Life is good!

You have solved a core need for your users and can see the initial signs of product-market fit. Customers are pulling your product and it is just flying off the shelves. Wow amazing, right? If only, it was this easy 😣You launch a new feature that most customers ask and suddenly your engagement metrics fall drastically. That must have been a rude shock? How come a feature that majority of your users asked for leads to drop-offs? You then realize you missed instrumenting that feature and are unable to track the metrics and funnel for that feature anf a few others launched before too. (As they say, you need data only when things break 🙂)

You painstakingly instrument every little thing in your product and start collecting all sorts of metrics. Now, you identify the issue with that feature and realize it was a simple validation issue with one form. You go ahead and fix it and everything is rosy once again? Well, you start to get the picture now.

Next, you decide to start your monetization and get customers to pay. You do all the work and understand the willingness to pay and come up with a beautiful 3x3 matrix of customer segments with their corresponding pricing and packaging design with a hybrid pricing model that relies on actual usage, because that is the value metric your customers see. Only thing left - set it up on Stripe and start seeing the cash tap flow.

Till now, you have been working on game-changing and high impact ideas that have moved the needle for your business and customers. You took care of strategy and execution and can see your 5 year path with the startup ahead and cannot wait to get to the next level. Then at the end of the 1st month after you start monetization, you face the music - early stage fast growing startups are pure chaos. You pre-empted it but not to the extent that you see there. And the faster the startup grows, more does the chaos.

What does this mean for you? While the price plans were setup on Stripe, you did not think what would happen when payments had to be collected? So, you end up manually pulling the usage data from all metering system or analytics tool and collate it in an Excel. Then, you export all the price plan, product and package information from Stripe. Then you do some magic and automate everything without worrying about accuracy of your invoices. (oh sorry, we skipped to the part where you use metering.ai to do the magic).

In reality, you end up spending 20+ hours of Vlookups, Pivot Tables, Row and Column transformations on Excel/Google Sheets and then painstakingly update all this information on your Stripe account. 20+ hours that you could be spending on actual strategic things that move the needle for your business and you spend it on operating important, but unnecessary grunt work that makes you sigh - ‘It’s 2023, we have ChatGPT and general AI, but not a tool that converts my raw usage data into metered usage and push it automatically into my billing system’.

Well, metering.ai is that tool and as a builder, having faced this exact same problem myself, I cannot wait for everyone who faced this problem to use it. And the best part - it is completely free. What we are asking for is 15 minutes of your time and understand how we can solve it for you. Please feel free to write to aravind@togai.com or reach out to us via our Chat support, or if you prefer having a chat - you can book a time on my calendar here. Happy metering!!!

Introduction

The SaaS landscape is increasingly adopting usage-based pricing models, making it essential to track product usage accurately and ensure error-free billing. Stripe Metered Billing is an excellent solution that allows businesses to charge customers based on their usage of products or services. However, implementing Stripe Metered Billing can be complicated, particularly when it comes to aggregating data and connecting it to the billing system. That's where Togai's Metering.ai comes in. In this article, we'll discuss how Metering.ai, a no-code metering tool, simplifies Stripe Metered Billing, enabling businesses to launch new pricing models effortlessly and eliminate billing errors without involving engineers.

The Growing Importance of Stripe Metered Billing in SaaS
Stripe Metered Billing is a powerful and flexible billing solution that enables businesses to charge customers based on their actual product usage. This billing model is ideal for companies offering usage-based pricing, such as cloud storage providers, streaming services, or any SaaS businesses. By adopting Stripe Metered Billing, businesses can create customized billing structures that ensure fair and accurate customer charges.

Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing Stripe Metered Billing
Despite its many advantages, implementing Stripe Metered Billing can be a daunting task. Connecting usage data to the billing system and aggregating it often requires significant engineering effort and a deep understanding of the software. This can be particularly challenging for smaller businesses or those with limited resources.

Introducing Metering.ai: Togai's No-Code Metering Solution for SaaS Billing
Metering.ai is Togai's innovative no-code metering tool designed to simplify Stripe Metered Billing. This groundbreaking solution allows non-engineers to easily aggregate usage data and connect it to Stripe without any coding expertise. In just three clicks, Metering.ai transforms product usage data into Stripe invoices, eliminating the need for engineering effort.

How Metering.ai Streamlines Stripe Metered Billing for SaaS Businesses
Metering.ai offers numerous benefits for businesses looking to implement Stripe Metered Billing:

Hassle-free Data Aggregation: One of the main challenges of implementing usage-based pricing in Stripe is aggregating the data. Metering.ai addresses this issue by providing a no-code platform that effortlessly aggregates usage data, without involving engineers.
Minimal Effort: Metering.ai is designed for non-engineers, enabling product managers or founders to set up and manage the system with ease. Its user-friendly interface ensures that anyone can navigate and comprehend the system.
Seamless Data Integration: Metering.ai applies transformations and aggregations on top of usage data, ensuring accurate connection to your billing system. This eliminates the need for complex Excel calculations and reduces the risk of billing errors and disputes.
Flexible Pricing Models: With Metering.ai, you can quickly experiment with and launch new pricing models based on usage data. This empowers you to optimize your revenue and provide better value to customers.

Scalability: As your business expands, Metering.ai scales with you, guaranteeing an efficient and accurate billing system.

Getting Started with Metering.ai for Streamlined SaaS Billing
To begin using Metering.ai for Stripe Metered Billing, follow these simple steps:

Sign up for a Togai account.
Connect your product usage data to the Metering.ai platform.
Configure your desired pricing and billing workflows.
With just three clicks, transform your product usage data into Stripe invoices.

Conclusion

Implementing Stripe Metered Billing has never been easier, thanks to Togai's Metering.ai. This no-code metering solution removes the need for extensive engineering effort and allows non-engineers to manage

Metering.ai is a no-code (and when we mean no-code, its absolutely zero code) tool to help you convert your usage data into Stripe invoices without having to maintain multiple Google sheets and Excel spreadsheets. You can read more about the tool in our previous blog post here. So, why did we build this tool? The world of SaaS monetization is changing. More companies are trying out modern pricing models that are based on consumption (usage and not users). Based on the report by Open View partners, the number of companies that are implementing complex models with hybrid pricing strategies has grown from 46% in 2022 to 61% in 2023. With the rise of PLG, pricing forms part of the core product strategy and companies that are pricing & building for the end user are winning. As pricing becomes more complex, we are seeing the rise of the modern pricing tech stack as seen in the State of Usage Based pricing report. Togai is well positioned as a unique player in the metering, pricing and billing stack to help companies implement any pricing model as they see fit in minutes and not months. We went down the rabbit hole of understanding the customer needs from first principles. After speaking with 100s of SaaS companies and founders, we realized the major considerations for product, finance and customer success teams to implement a new pricing model based on usage and generate accurate invoices for their customers:

Manual effort of atleast 20 hours every month to generate invoices
Automating it requires engineering bandwidth which is extremely hard to get
Time taken to launch a pricing strategy is extremely high (>3 months)
Maintain complex excel spreadsheets and Google sheets to manage your pricing in an unsecure manner
Unable to trigger workflows or set alerts based on rules (eg: change price plan when a customer crosses a usage threshold)
We realized the need for a tool that could solve for the above for a product/finance/customer success team without the need to involve other stakeholders. This was a pain they faced but more often than not, the solution required external help. This is why we decided to build a solution that solved the need of the end user and not the external stakeholder.

Metering.ai is built on the same foundation as Togai and provides the scalability and flexibility to

Convert raw usage data in format into Stripe invoices
Apply any type of computation and transformation (we support everything that Excel does)
Automatically push this information to Stripe
With absolutely NO code or engineering effort.
We decided to launch Metering.ai as a Free tool and help companies not have to worry about the bottlenecks of their billing system to change/implement their pricing model. In fact, Metering.ai does not even send your information to our servers and you do not have to worry about your data privacy in any way.

The only request I have is for people to share feedback through our Live chat or have a quick chat by booking some time here

Happy pricing and invoicing 😀 !!!